Faculty of Human Sciences
scienceshumaines@ustpaul.ca
Telephone: 613-236-1393
1-800-637-6859
Quick Links

Professor Anna Sheftel launches her new project, Refugee Boulevard

Professor Anna Sheftel, School of Conflict Studies, has launched a new community-based project entitled Refugee Boulevard: Making Montreal Home after the Holocaust. (http://refugeeboulevard.ca)

This project is a collaboration among researchers at Saint Paul University, Dawson College, and the Montreal Holocaust Museum; it was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Partnership-Engage Grant. Refugee Boulevard offers an immersive audio walk (free and downloadable onto your smartphone) that tells the story of Holocaust survivors when they first arrived in Montreal in the late 1940s, in their own voices. It consists of stories of resettlement, socializing, food, work, dating, discrimination, and both the obstacles and the joys inherent in making Montreal and Canada home. The accompanying website also contains video clips from interviews on the same themes, as well as a downloadable booklet with archival images from the period.

Refugee Boulevard has received considerable press coverage already. Here are links to some of the coverage: 

Prof. Sheftel is an associate professor in the School of Conflict Studies with an expertise in oral history, memory studies, narratives, ethics, and representation of the violent past. She has done oral history projects about wartime memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the public testimony practices of Holocaust survivors in Montreal. Her current project examines the life stories of Holocaust survivors who experienced sustained socioeconomic hardship in Canada. She has also published extensively on oral history practice and ethics, most notably in Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice, coedited with Stacey Zembrzycki, which won the Oral History Association’s 2014 Book Award. She completed her PhD in modern history at the University of Oxford.



Bookmark and Share

Other Links